From the New York Times:
The shifting priorities illustrate the trade-off between combat and reconstruction that the American military is still grappling with, but especially in remote regions like this one, where the Iraqi government is still almost nonexistent.
The Marines’ effort is also a test of the Bush administration’s declaration that it will focus this year on holding and rebuilding Iraqi towns, rather than departing after military operations and allowing insurgents to return.
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From the Washington Post:
The new Hamas-led government is broke and failed to pay tens of thousands of Palestinian public workers on Saturday, Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh said Wednesday.
It was the first time the radical Islamic group had admitted that it would have difficulty running the West Bank and Gaza Strip without massive foreign aid.
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From the Washington Post:
Researchers said nearly two decades ago that this tiny country was part of an AIDS Belt stretching across the midsection of Africa, a place so infected with a new, incurable disease that, in the hardest-hit places, one in three working-age adults were already doomed to die of it.
But AIDS deaths on the predicted scale never arrived here, government health officials say. A new national study illustrates why: The rate of HIV infection among Rwandans ages 15 to 49 is 3 percent, according to the study, enough to qualify as a major health problem but not nearly the national catastrophe once predicted.
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From the Washington Post:
Two weeks later, Hansen suggested to an audience at the New School University in New York that his counterparts at NOAA were experiencing even more severe censorship. “It seems more like Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union than the United States,” he told the crowd.
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From Reuters:
That was one of the few points of agreement between journalists, a professional blogger and a U.S. military spokesman gathered in New York to discuss media in Iraq.
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From the Atlantic, Mark Bowden’s article on the failed hostage rescue attempt in Iran:
He calmly explained to the others what had happened. The men took in the awful news quietly. Then Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, who had submitted his resignation earlier that day because he objected to the mission, said, “Mr. President, I’m very, very sorry.” Jordan ducked into the president’s bathroom and vomited.
America’s elite rescue force had lost eight men, seven helicopters, and a C-130, and had not even made contact with the enemy. It was a debacle. It defined the word “debacle.
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From the New York Times:
Mr. Hussein dodged questions, quoted from the Koran, and again repeatedly questioned the legitimacy of the court.
Asked by the prosecutor, Jaafar al-Mousawi, how he could go through the evidence against the 148 in just two days before signing off on their execution orders, Mr. Hussein answered, according to a pool report: “That is the right of the head of state.”
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From the Canadian Press, a poorly researched article about a possible FLDS ‘colony’ in Saskatchewan. For the record, Bruce Wisan is hardly a spokesman for the church. They consider him the enemy. Small point, eh? From CP:
Last week Bruce Wisan, a spokesman for the church, said Jeffs may be creating a new colony in Saskatchewan and that as many as 40 per cent of the church members may be moving to “a very remote, pristine area to start over again.”
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Photographs of Tel Aviv, Israel, by Paolo Pellegrin, from Magnum Photos.
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From Juxtapoz:
Photos from the opening night of Shepard Fairey’s solo show at White Walls Gallery in San Francisco.
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From Juxtapoz, interview with Shepard Fairey:
I feel that I am lucky because I’ve created a formula to which my career as an artist, designer and street artist are able to feed off each other. There are some people that are purists that probably still live with their parents who say if you do street art and commercial art, you’re a sellout, but that is just not a realistic perspective for me.
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From Exactitudes.Com, an amazing photographic exploration of people, fashion, subcultures.
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From the New York Times, more Liberia:
According to local legend, recounted by the Africa scholar Stephen Ellis in his book “The Mask of Anarchy,” a baby born in Monrovia, Liberia’s capital, miraculously spoke English straight from the womb. It told its mother that a rain of death would fall Christmas Day, and that it did not want to live in such a vicious world, and promptly drew its last breath.
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From the New York Times, Helene Cooper recounts a Liberian story featuring Charles Taylor’s wigged thugs:
The group came upon a burning house. A female Taylor fighter walked up to Janice and admired Logosou. “Oh, what a fine baby!” she cooed. “I’ve killed two like him today.”
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From the International Crisis Group, the April edition of CrisisWatch:
Clashes in Pakistan’s North Waziristan killed over 200 and threatened to spread to neighbouring tribal regions. In Uzbekistan, the government intensified its campaign on opposition activists and international organisations, expelling the United Nations refugee agency and sentencing dissidents to long prison terms. The situation also deteriorated in the Central African Republic, Chad, Ecuador, Gambia, Guinea-Bissau/Senegal and Turkey.
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Real pranksters take today off and let the amateurs have their fun.
From the New York Times:
One elaborate tattoo posted shortly after his blog’s inception in late 2004 means “power piglet,” according to Mr. Tang’s translation. Another, on a woman’s lower back, says “motherly beast blessing.”
Marquis Daniels, of the Dallas Mavericks, thought he was getting his initials in Chinese characters but what his arm actually says is “healthy woman roof,” Mr. Tang said. Similarly, Shawn Marion of the Phoenix Suns was under the impression that his nickname, “the Matrix,” was tattooed on his leg, but Mr. Tang says the inscription translates as something like “demon bird moth balls.”
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From the Boston Herald:
Smith snapped the photo of Scalia flicking his hand under his chin after a Herald reporter asked the conservative jurist his response to people who question his impartiality on matters of church and state.
Smith wouldn’t give up the photo earlier this week but chose to release it when he learned Scalia said his gesture had been incorrectly characterized by the Herald. Smith, who was standing in front of the judge, said the Herald “got the story right.”
While news outlets from across the country sought Smith’s photo yesterday, the archdiocese said there’s no proof that Scalia uttered an obsenity in the church. Smith said Scalia said, “To my critics, I say, ‘Vaffanculo,’ ” while making the gesture. That’s Italian for (expletive) you.
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